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By David Futrelle
What if incels took a break from their endless circle-jerking about the putative evil of “femoids” and “cucks” and how the world treats them so badly it’s like another Holocaust, and decided to put some of their energy into making the world a better place for incels?
Well, some incels have decided to do just that, setting up a website for a largely imaginary incel political party, complete with statements of principle and even a half-baked platform. Not surprisingly, it urns out that their vision of an incel utopia would destroy the civil liberties of other people while keeping incels themselves as miserable as they already are.
The platform on the Incel Party site is a genuinely weird set of proposals, ranging from the almost sensible (their version of universal basic income) to the bizarre (forcing Hollywood to make “More Michael Cera movies, but where he is not just shy, but unemployed and living with his parents”). You see, as the platform explains,
The national socialists were able to convince a buncha Germans that Jews needed to be gassed (against human nature, as gassing is not a natural human drive). Similarly, (but non-violently) we could legally convince women that unemployed men are desirable through hollywood movies. IE men don’t need hollywood to adjust our sexual drives, but women do. And it wouldn’t be scamming women, but genuinely overriding their nature. Female sexuality is more influenced by social mores than male sexuality.
The incels are not big on respect for women.
In case you’re wondering, the Incel Party platform has a solution for that whole “involuntary celibacy” thing: “Pay femcels and incels to date each other.”
Given that most incels don’t even think that femcels exist — because every women on earth can apparently get all the sex she wants — I’m not quite sure how this plan would work on a practical level.
And apparently this plan would only work for white people, as the platform also demands “[s]tate mandated femdom girlfriends for all people of color. No they won’t be paid.” What if people of color don’t want femdom girlfriends? More to the point, what if the femdoms don’t want to be femdom girlfriends for incels? Women’s bodies can’t simply be distributed like government cheese.
The party also has a rather unique program for helping millennials aquire real estate: simply confiscate homes now belonging to boomers. But don’t worry! The boomers would still be allowed to live in their old homes alongside the new owners. “We are not trying to just kick Dad out.,” the Incel party helpfully explains.
The strangest demand?
Make all anime real life immediately with absolutely no exceptions.We will seize the portal to imagination land the government has and bring all the anime girl to our reality.
Depressingly, alongside all this ridiculousness, the Incel Party devotes most of its energy to a completely self-destructive platform plank: “Abolish psychiatry.”
Most incels could benefit immensely from good psychiatric care or, at the very least, therapy. But that’s incompatible with the basic tenets of their intensely pessimistic and self-defeating “black pill” philosophy, which holds that psychiatry is a simultaneously ineffective yet also dangerous attempt to control incels and others. As the Party asserts on a page devoted to the suject:
Psychiatry is an instrument of social-control for deviants who aren’t in regular jail. In other words, “Society’s Sewer“. If you deviate from society in any meaningful way and you do not live on your own, expect to meet a psychiatrist at some point in your life.
It’s basically RD Laing meets Scientology, though the incels insist that their irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry is is somehow different than Scientology.’s irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry.
The entire project reflects incels on their best behavior. There are no nasty attacks on “foids,” no creepy discussions of the sexuality of underage girls, no glorification of Elliot Rodger or other incel mass killers. But incels are incels, and the Incel Party website is as suffused with misogyny as any Incels.co forum rant. And the site is steeped in the nihilistic pessimism of the “black pill” philosophy. It’s telling that the platform offers only jokey non-solutions (“make anime real”), “solutions” that abrogate the rights of others, and the wholly self-destructive demand to abolish psychiatry, which in the end is one of the few things that could bring incels back from the edge.
It would all be a lot funnier if it weren’t also so sad.
H/T — once again goes to Twitter’s @EXPELincels, whose tweet brought my attention to the incel party website
Whenever I forget a word in a conversation I always say “Oh, I can’t remember the English for that.” Then people think I’m a smart foreigner rather than a daft British bloke.
@Ohlmann,
If you’re asking if MLP included anything like upskirt shots or the equivalent, the answer is no. US network television can be very strict on what can be shown in a kids show, and on how certain things can be presented. In fact, some of their demands can be downright bizarre at times, based on the idea that ‘young kids can’t understand [certain things] and thus need to be protected from it’. (In some cases at least, its the parents not wanting/having time to answer whatever questions their kids may have about certain subjects, so those subjects don’t get raised.)
That’s not to say kids shows can’t have content that engages adults along with the children; many shows do. Just that said content can’t be overtly sexual, amongst other restrictions.
ETA: in regards to English borrowing words from other languages – don’t other languages do that as well? Borrow from others that is.
All languages borrow words and concepts, even grammatical structures when they interact with other languages. I don’t see why it should be construed as “stealing” when English does it.
Since 19th century, Finnish has adopted a huge amount of cultural and scientific concepts that originated in either German or English speaking world, but those concepts were typically translated* (expressed in traditional Finnish words) rather than directly borrowed. I think this is an artifact of our language-focused nationalism, which AFAIK is a thing in many small European nations, but not so much in English speaking nations.
*For example Schadenfreude > vahingonilo
Alan:
Pro tip – In online interactions, I’ve found I can fake intelligence & English proficiency by simply thinking carefully what I write.
@Lumipuna:
Because of the British Empire. We stole most of the world, so it kind of makes sense to frame our language that way.
@Lumipuna
English does this as well, such as the phrase “flea market” from a French expression “marché aux puces”.
Some other languages that do this are Hebrew and Icelandic, which both have governing bodies that create new words to avoid changing these older languages with loanwords.
At the very least, French is at the very very least as good as english at that. It’s ever slightly less visible because the pompuous “french academy” trop to avoid that, but mostly they are between 5 and 50 years late compared to how the language is actually used.
@redsilkphoenix : I was more thinking about havjng several level of reading or reflexion. Truly all age content tend to have a ton of it – like in french comics how Asterix have a metric shitton of social commentary or how disney movies often have more evolved subtitle and plots that aren’t easy to get by younger viewer but pleasing for older one.
Much like we do for everything else. Hey, you find a technique that works, you use it.
My previous comment was meant as lighthearted, and I don’t think English is wrong to borrow words. At school, it just struck me as odd that in other languages I’d taken (these being German and Swedish at the time), using direct loan words seemed to be something of a faux pas, while in English, it was a way of showing how clever you were.
And also, English spelling was already hard enough, so having all sorts of words from different languages (with diacritics removed) didn’t help things at all.
to be fair when mlp started there was 1 princess the white one the black onr was introduced later that season.
While the do have jokes and references aimed at parents there is no intentional sexual inuendo in mlp
an online convsatuon between a bronie and the creator whent something like this
thanks for putting the sexual content in mlp
what are you on anout there is no sexual content in mlp you perverted freak
If I could pick, it’d be a toss-up between living in the pokemon world, or Fairy Tail.
I literally make my own invented universe for real but the reality in this universe is that it take weeks worth of preparation, planning, design and lots of hard work to get 20 minutes of living actually in that invented universe. Worth it definitely but that’s performance art.
Masse_Mysteria said:
It just seemed so lazy to me, especially since I think my first introduction into this was hearing the word “Schadenfreude” used in English. Puzzled, I asked, “Isn’t there an English word for Schadenfreude?” and the answer was practically, “Yeah, it’s schadenfreude”.
___________________________
I’d always heard there was no single-word translation. My sources were wrong. The English word is “epicaricacy.”
But Schadenfreude is so much more fun to say – and more flavorful!
In the meantime, there’s at least one book about similar words, even if, as some reviewers claim, the title is a bit misleading:
They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases
by Howard Rheingold (1988)
“They Have a Word for It takes the reader to the far corners of the globe to discover words and phrases for which there are no equivalents in English. From the North Pole to New Guinea, from Easter Island to Tibet, Howard Rheingold explores more than forty familiar and obscure languages to discover genuinely useful (rather than simply odd) words that can open up new ways of understanding and experience life.”
Goodreads has an average rating of 3.87 out of 5. It was reprinted in 2002.
Similar (and more recent?) books are: Lost in Translation, Other-Wordly, and There’s a Word For It.
@Lenona
I didn’t know that word before. Thank you for sharing it with us.
“Epicaricacy”? Sounds a lot like barbarised Greek.
I did a bit of research. The word is derived from the Ancient Greek phrase “èpí xará kakós” (literally “upon pleasure evil”) which had the same meaning. It appeared in the very earliest English dictionaries, but nowhere else (or at least not in any known written English). After that, it disappeared entirely until the very early 21st century, and still sees virtually no use. It seems to only exist so that people can claim that there’s an existing English equivalent of “schadenfreude”.
@Snowberry
Since a lot of words are only used as equivalents of other words or exist for other unusual reasons, it still seems like a valid word. I’ll use it (though I just checked and it is not a valid Scrabble word).
@Redsilkphoenix
Not to nearly the same extent. Modern English quite probably contains more loan words than ones with roots in Old English, starting with all the French vocabulary instilled by the Norman conquest. English is a creole language, unlike most extant major languages.
@Lumipuna
The technical term for this is a calque, and it’s much more common than just taking the original word and cramming it into an existing language.
WRT teen shows, as a Canadian, I believe I am constitutionally required to bring up Degrassi at this point.
I’m not Canadian, but I do like Degrassi
@Snowberry
Yeah, I don’t think any English speaker has ever actually used that word in conversation, so I won’t count it as a legitimate word. Also, as Lumipuna points out, it’s made out of Greek words, not English ones, so it still doesn’t count as a non-borrowed word.
@Dalillama
I just checked and it isn’t a valid Scrabble word either, so I guess that’s another point against it. That being said, there isn’t really any one person or group that determines what is and isn’t a word, so if more people start using it, it could be an accepted term in the future.
If there were an English form of “schadenfreude” it would be sceaþafrófor. That’s not a real word either, but it would be a genuinely English calque of the German word.
Speaking of language, I was taken aback by how few details are listed in that “make anime real” bulletpoint.
Made me realize there already exists a simple three-word query that could make their entire political movement collapse in on itself like a ravenous ouroborous:
“Dubs or Subs?”
@CasualCatharsis
Omg!